Our first guest episode in the Cordelives Club! My friend Brian—poet, professor, lover of Paris—joins to talk about James Baldwin’s brilliant short story “Sonny’s Blues", and tunes in an absolute tour de force.

Brian takes us through the story from the sentence level out to the wider context of Baldwin’s life; we cover everything from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s to Baldwin’s influences from painting and music to the Parisian art scene to Biblical allegory to the way imagery and metaphor function in “Sonny’s Blues” to mediate identity and meaning. Fortunately for everyone, I pretty quickly understood just how well prepared Brian was for this conversation, and mostly got out of the way!

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